


Memoriam

by wearethewitches



Category: Underworld (Movies)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Feels, Grief/Mourning, Past Character Death, Reincarnation, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25983037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearethewitches/pseuds/wearethewitches
Summary: Selene is Sonja, reincarnated. The night she runs in three parts.
Relationships: Lucian/Selene (Underworld), Lucian/Sonja (Underworld)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 77





	1. Dreams

Selene dreams of a castle.

She’s trapped in a cavernous room, chains holding her to a post and above her, from an opening in a great, mechanical dome, sunlight pours in. In the dream, she burns alive – and yet, a moment later she’s running through a corridor belonging to that same castle and there, in the shadows, is Viktor. He smiles at her like she’s the most precious thing in the world.

It happens over and over, again and again – dying, then running. Selene can’t sleep without dreaming. She tries to stay awake to avoid it, but Kahn sees right through her.

“You’re exhausted,” he says. “No way am I sending you out like this.”

“Kahn-” Selene tries to argue, but he can speak her language, when he wants to. She doesn’t react quickly enough to stop him from grabbing her gun, reflexes slow and loose, proving just how slow she’s gotten. _Denial will get me killed,_ she thinks, drooping – the Beretta in his hands is proof of that.

Kahn looks at her pityingly. “Get some sleep, Selene.”

“I can’t,” she replies, but when he presses, the vampire leaves the training dojo. It’s bad enough they know she’s not sleeping, forget that she’s having nightmares. She desperately wishes she could ask Viktor for advice, even though something deep in her belly revolts at the action, a foreboding for if she ever told Viktor what she dreams of.

Selene retires. Tries to sleep. But instead, she dreams and when the sunlight hits her, she screams in the real world and sobs for Viktor’s smile, when she runs towards him, arms outstretched. In her dreams, she never makes it into the safety of his embrace, always running and running, heart _racing_ in sudden fear and what was Viktor’s familiar smile becomes a snarl in the rain. His eyes bore into hers and there is a sword in her hand as she levels it towards him, hand resting against the faint swell of her stomach.

_For the sake of your grandchild._

Selene wakes with a gasp, terror running through her like ice. The words reverberate in her mind as if she’d just said them – _please call off your men, for the sake of your grandchild, please call off your men, for the sake of your grandchild_ – and Selene throws up what little lies in her stomach over the side of her bed. It splashes against the floor and the fear and anxiety possessing her fades in an instant – but the experience shakes her, leaving her trembling and afraid.

“What was that?” She whispers to herself, hearing the revelry in the manor below. Her heart pounds against her ribcage, a savage drumbeat to the laughs and chimes of the Coven. **_What was that?_**

Selene leaves her bed, avoiding the splatter of blood and acid on the dark floor, climbing over the end to her chaise. She can’t imagine the idea of pulling on her bodysuit, right now – but she can’t stay here. That drumbeat is telling her to _run, run, run_ and who is Selene to deny herself? Why should she? And while her body-clock is broken from her non-existent sleeping habits, rendering her unable to tell how long it is until sunset, there are safe-houses in the city. _Safe-houses monitored from the mansion,_ the words creep into her psyche, Viktor’s bright eyes – so bright, so very, very _angry, **your grandchild**_ – seeing deep into her soul. His presence lingers, crawling down her back and Selene needs to _go._

“Clothes,” she whispers, telling herself what to do as she tentatively stands, heading to her wardrobe, “Car. Safety.”

She could find a warehouse. A church attic. Selene finds a black shirt with lace sleeves and a set of leather trousers – neither hers, both Erika’s from what is clearly an attempt at intervention – and changes with mind that isn’t thinking for itself. _Grandchild, a clearing by the river, killing me won’t save-_ words that she has heard before, disjointed and out of order, all swirling around in her brain with no regard to her sanity. Clarity only returns with her boots, the familiarity of her stance pulling her from the cycle.

 _What am I doing?_ Selene asks herself, seeing herself in the mirror and not recognising her own face. “I am safe here.”

 _You are not safe, you never will be, not here._ The reflection in the mirror raises her hand and Selene meets it, seeking brown eyes where there should be olive and hazel, knowing that her brow isn’t that stern or her cheekbones that hard. Where is the softness, that she has tried so hard to hide? The woman rests her forehead against the glass and Selene matches her, the two so close, yet so far.

_Your face will not be here when this is over, will it?_

The woman speaks and Selene whispers them alongside her.

“Goodbye, my love.”

Then, nothing – no dreaming, no words, nothing except the faint urge to flee and the certain knowledge that Viktor will not save her. Selene has trusted Viktor all her life, ever since he came to her and told her the fate of her family – how could that trust disappear so readily? She does not understand and when she tries to remember that feeling, it comes, but all she associates it with is hurt and love and betrayal – the finality of an end that can never be reborn.

To her reflection – her _real_ reflection – Selene whispers, “I am not safe here,” directly opposing what she said before. Ördögház is her home…

But Selene will not let it contain her. Not this day.

It takes little effort to leave, single-minded in her borrowing of a car and parking it far from where she ends up, walking in the early morning streetlight and knowing that out here, in the real world, her only concern is the sun.

Head tilted down and her coat wrapped around her, bearing no weapons barring her fists, perhaps Selene should be surprised that she still notices the lycan. Her eyes trace his figure in the shadow of an alleyway, his gaze falling on her the moment she really looks. Across the street from each other, there is a moment of nothingness, as both parties decide whether to act or not.

The Selene of yesterday would have shot him. The Selene of today can still feel the heel of exhaustion’s boot on her head, brain slow and only capable of simple thought, that knows if she fought this lycan, she would most certainly die. So instead, Selene looks away and moves further up the street, sitting down on a bench covered in frost. Her back is to the alleyway – a colossal feat of idiocy, but something she can accept in this place in her mind. Death has already become her, in dreams.

“You aren’t afraid,” he says, voice carrying across the road despite the modulated tone. His feet crunch the ice beneath them as he leaves his companions behind, sending them home when they call for him. Selene looks up at her namesake, full and bright in the sky, so clear she can see the craters.

She wonders.


	2. Hearts

Selene eventually asks him, “What do lycans dream about?”

“When we sleep or when we are awake?” he questions in return, philosophical about the matter while Selene seeks answers.

“Both,” she decides to ask, finally looking his way. With long brown hair and a strange smile, he looks like any other lycan, shirtless under his coat – ready for a transformation at any moment. This close, with his strange posture, he could rip out her throat in an instant.

“Lycans hope for peace, when they are able to think about it. A world without war, where they can raise their children, knowing they will never be touched by the violence they have seen in this bitter conflict of ours. And when they dream…” he trails off, smile becoming touched with bitterness, “Each to ones own, I would suppose. What do you dream of? Should you not be shutting yourself away from the deathly rays of our beloved sun?”

“Ördögház does not feel safe to me,” admits Selene, looking away from him, not wanting to see even a hint of satisfaction. “I dream of a life I did not live. Blood-memories, perhaps. They leave me without trust in my lord, from betrayal so deep I could never forgive him.”

“Memories?” The lycan asks, the investment in his voice deeper than Selene would have thought. “Whose? Do you know?”

“But it doesn’t make sense,” Selene tells him, twisting where she sits, holding onto the bench like it is her only tether to the world. “I felt myself dying, turned to ash – how could I know this? That’s not how it works!”

Eyes level with her own, the lycan leans in and Selene’s instincts do not fight it, do not tell her to back away or to take his head off. Instead, they tell her to reach out to him – and this, _this_ is what Selene fights, holding herself steady as he speaks to her in a rough voice.

“Who killed you?”

“Viktor,” his name bursts out of her mouth like a sob, “I don’t understand. How could he do that to me? To _me!”_

“Oh, dear one,” says the lycan, hand rising to cup her face, “You look like her.”

“The woman in the mirror.”

Hunger. Desperation. It blooms on his face and Selene _does not know what to do._ “She looked like you,” he says, voice high and rushed, “but harder. Older.”

“I don’t understand,” Selene repeats herself, feeling vulnerable and angry. Her expression twists and she grabs for his jacket, clenching her fists around the battered brown leather, locking them both in place. “Why am I dreaming of that life, Lucian?”

And Lucian breaks out into a glorious smile, happiness taking over his face as he leans in to kiss her. Selene lets him – because it feels _right_. In no world could this ever be wrong.

**_That thing inside you is a monstrosity._ **

Gasping, Selene pulls away, still clutching tight to his coat. Lucian cradles her face in one hand and draws his fingers over her hip with the other, his eyes full of concern.

“Sonja,” he whispers.

“My name is Selene,” she says, distant as she tries to put everything straight in her mind; except, she cannot and more things fade than come into focus. “Lucian-”

“Selene,” he repeats her name with certainty, pressing a softer kiss to her lips than before. Selene leans into it, then finally releases his coat, the clink of metal drawing her eyes downwards – straight to a necklace that burns a path straight through her mind to a castle, hidden in the mountains from anyone and everyone that might try to reach it.

Seeing where her focus now lies, Lucian brings it up off his chest, into clearer sight. “You had another life,” he tells her, “and you wore this, always.”

“It is not in that life I recognise it from,” Selene tells him, not quite understanding it herself. Did she live in the same time and place twice? “I held this as a child, before the turn of the fourteenth century.”

“How can that be?” He asks and it is of Selene and- and _Sonja_ living in the same years, of Selene knowing parts of Sonja’s life. “It can’t be possible.”

“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,” Selene quotes, “Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“William Shakespeare was an arse,” Lucian informs her immediately, but his behaviour does not change. He still holds her as close as he can, like she is both the most delicate of flowers and the love of his life. Selene feels inside herself things that she should not know or feel – but they are _hers,_ something she won’t let anyone deny.

“Viktor killed me,” she says out loud. “Why did I care so much for him, Lucian? Who was I, to him?”

“Oh, Selene,” Lucian presses kisses to her lips and to her hair, “He erases history, if you do not know.”

She says to him, “We aren’t allowed to look back, only forwards.”

“We learn lessons from the past and change, from them. Viktor killed his own daughter in his attempt to stop us from evolving.”

_For the sake of **your grandchild-**_

Trembling, Selene can’t even say what she wants to say, despairing what they lost in a wordless cry. Lucian doesn’t stop for her permission as he drags her against his chest, holding her as grief bombards her from all sides.

 _He killed me,_ she thinks, memories kicked up like dust into the light, where she can finally see them. _He killed our child!_

“Shh,” Lucian soothes, though his voice is as wet as hers. Selene gasps for breath and in that early morning dark, she does not care for the world, sobbing and crying and once, even beating against Lucian’s hold, blaming him – and then apologising, weeping even worse than before. Lucian has had centuries with his grief.

Selene has had an hour.


	3. Sunlight

The sewers in which the lycans make their home are not to her liking, but the dawn has already spread rays across Budapest and no longer is it safe for her to roam. Never has she been more glad that a vampire’s sense of smell is all but extinguished upon changing. Lucian guides her deep into their sanctum, arm wrapped around her shoulders protectively and he snarls deep in his chest when other lycans roar or spit or complain. Selene cares not, the flinch not even appearing when one fakes a lunge – she’s just so _exhausted._

A beady-eyed lycan, a doctor of some type, frowns at the sight of her when Lucian leads her to him, only becoming more agitated when Lucian proclaims her to be Sonja reincarnate. “Science,” he insists, “says she is not _her_. Reincarnation is a myth and even if she was turned by Viktor, blood memories do not work like that, Lucian-”

Selene tunes him out, taking advantage of Lucian’s distraction to slip out from under his arm. She is not one to be coddled and there is a cot-bed in the corner of the room, half-hidden behind plastic sheeting. _Let them kill me, if I am too tired to stop them,_ she thinks, collapsing face first onto the musty sheets. The background noise doesn’t deter her from falling into slumber and Selene is only awoken when an unfamiliar hand grips her bicep calmly.

“Who are you?”

The voice is incredibly deep and Selene knows it, just like she knows Lucian. When her eyes open, she sees a lycan with dark skin that she remembers from the ambush – _what ambush?_ – whom Lucian later claimed as his right hand in the mass breakout.

Gaze boring into her, Selene answers truthfully: “I don’t know.”

He purses his lips, then releases her arm. Selene sits up, feeling almost dizzy from the abrupt wake-up as she continues on to say, “Selene. I was turned by Viktor nearly four hundred years ago. I knew who Lucian was without an introduction and I’ve been dreaming of the day we burned alive.”

The lycan man jerks back, eyes filling with colour. Selene supposes that since she’s never heard of a vampire and lycan successfully breeding, it’s a closely guarded secret that-

She holds her thoughts tightly, chest constricting as she refuses to breath. Acknowledging the truth, even in her own mind, is hard – denial would be easier. Sonja- Selene- _she_. Her. Them.

“Sonja,” his rumbling voice says, surprisingly gentle for such a behemoth. “Selene,” he corrects himself, almost as an afterthought. In the distance, Selene can hear the doctor puttering around his laboratory; Lucian isn’t within hearing range, which makes her spirits fall. That feeling – that _love, goodbye my love, your face will not –_ swells almost painfully beneath her breasts.

“I do not recall your name,” she replies plainly, before he introduces himself as _Raze._

Time passes slowly underground and three weeks pass before Selene sees another vampire, brought in by a veritable horde of lycans who are ready to rip him apart, but staying their claws. Selene recognises him as one of Kraven’s disciples, a Deathdealer called Janos – and he, in turn, recognises her.

“Selene?” His expression is, peculiarly, not one of horror or confusion, but _surprise_. Frowning minutely, Selene doesn’t speak as Lucian steps forwards from the shadows.

His voice is sharp. “What is this?”

“Said something about a truce, lord,” says one of the lycans, suspicion clear. Lucian raises an eyebrow at Janos, whose mouth runs an instant later.

“I come on behalf of my benefactor, Kraven of Ördögház. He wants to speak to you.”

 _Kraven?_ Selene clenches her fist, knowing suddenly what she should have realised by now – that Kraven is a traitor, who did not kill Lucian and has known that Lucian survived.

Janos is not done, though. He looks to her and asks, almost begging, “You know, don’t you? Your disappearance is a set-up. All the Deathdealers in Hungary are looking for you.”

The room stirs at his words. Selene does not answer him.

Lucian himself looks back, his eyes filled with caring. He will keep her safe, clearly – and Kraven is not safe. Not in the slightest. So, it is to no surprise to Selene that when he turns back to the vampire, he rips out his throat with a single, bare, human hand.

There will be no alliance, today.


End file.
